There has been considerable interest in recent times in the provision of web services, i.e. the provision of services on the internet that do not simply provide web pages for display to human users.
One approach that has been adopted is a registry for defining aspects of web-available services. For example, the universal description discovery and integration (UDDI) standard defines an extended markup language (XML) based registry that allows services to be published with details about the service provided. Such registries can be interrogated for further information which may, for example, include web service description language (WDSL) documents defining web services, including protocol bindings and message formats. The registry will normally be interrogated by messages in a standard format, such as the SOAP format, or other suitable formats.
Many other types of information may also be included in a database, also known as a repository.
In order to classify the information, various classification schemes, known as taxonomies, can be adopted. For example, Dun and Bradsheet have defined numbers in the data universal numbering system (D-U-N-S). Each business that has applied for such a number has a single unique number assigned to it. Another taxonomy is the ISO 3166 Geographic taxonomy which assigns a number representing a geographic location. Further examples include taxonomies that assign numbers to different types of business service, so one number indicates a supplier of courier services and another number indicates a supplier of photocopying services.
In general, a single entry may include a number of such codes, in a number of taxonomies. For example, an entry may include the D-U-N-S number to identify the service provider, an ISO 3166 code to indicate the geographic location, and other numbers indicating the service provided. The provision of multiple codes allows the search for a number of different aspects of the data entry provided, for example it allows a user to search for a particular geographic location.
The definitions of a taxonomy may change over time. New codes may be introduced for new categories, former codes merged or deleted, and the definitions of specific codes may change.
There is accordingly a need to ensure that changes can be made.